Where I feel
strongest.

Thorong La, the pass at the top, sits at 5,416m. The full loop runs 160 to 230km around the Annapurna massif, most of it walked over two to three weeks.

At 6,438m, Illimani stands higher than any peak in Europe or North America. Up there the air holds barely half the oxygen of sea level.

The glaciers of Bolivia's Cordillera Real are some of the closest ice to the equator on Earth, and they are melting fast. Roped up, one wrong step vanishes into a crevasse.

Northern Vietnam's Ha Giang is a sea of limestone karst on the Chinese border. This seat meant scrambling up the rock first, and then the whole valley fell silent below.

The Ha Giang Loop is a 350km motorbike ride through Vietnam's far north. Its high point, the Ma Pi Leng Pass, is one of the country's legendary Four Great Passes.

Annapurna I, at 8,091m, is the deadliest of the fourteen 8,000m peaks: for decades roughly one climber died for every three who reached the top. It was also the first 8,000er ever summited, in 1950.

The Annapurna Circuit climbs from rice paddies to high desert and over Thorong La at 5,416m. Prayer flags line the path the whole way up.

Every patch is a border crossed, from Andean salt flats to Himalayan passes. Fifty countries so far, and counting.

Tibetan prayer flags carry five colours for the five elements. They are never taken down, only left to fray, so the wind can carry the prayers away.

The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat on Earth, over 10,000 km². After rain it turns into a mirror so flat that satellites use it to calibrate.

Battambang's 'norry' is a bamboo platform on train wheels, pushed down a single old track by a small motor. When two meet, the lighter one is lifted off in seconds to let the other pass.

I drove the whole way around Sri Lanka twice in a rented tuk-tuk, and had to earn a Sri Lankan tuk-tuk licence to do it. Three wheels, no doors, the entire island at 40km/h.

Every Balinese temple asks you to wear a sarong and sash before you enter. The island runs on its own ceremonial calendar, with fresh offerings, the canang sari, laid on the ground each morning.

Minca clings to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range on Earth. That jungle track was deep mud, and on a street bike with slick tyres it was closer to ice skating than riding.

Cerro Negro is one of the youngest and most active volcanoes in the Americas. You hike up the black ash cone with a board on your back, then sled straight back down the slope, which is exactly as reckless as the jumpsuit and goggles suggest.

The Amazon holds around a tenth of all known species on Earth. On the ground it is mostly heat, deep green, and the sound of absolutely everything at once.

Colca Canyon is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. Its most famous residents are Andean condors, the largest flying birds on Earth, which ride the morning thermals out of the gorge. One is in this frame.

Ha Giang's mountain roads were cut by hand into near-vertical limestone. Every switchback opens onto a valley of a different Hmong, Tay or Dao village.

Sri Lanka is small enough to lap in a week, but speed was never the point. The tuk-tuk filled up with people met along the way, and the island unspooled at 40km/h.